‘Searching for Sugar Man’ Spotlights the Musician Rodriguez

Rodriguez, at the Hamptons International Film Festival.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

It’s a real-life tale of talent disregarded, bad luck and missed opportunities, with an improbable stop in the Hamptons and a Hollywood conclusion: A singer-songwriter is signed to a contract in the late 1960s after producers with ties to Motown Records see him playing in a smoky Detroit nightclub called the Sewer. He makes a pair of albums that sell almost nothing and then drops out of sight. So why, 40 years later, would anyone feel compelled to make a movie about this obscure artist, known professionally as Rodriguez?

Because, as it turns out, on the other side of the globe, in South Africa, Rodriguez had become as popular as the Rolling Stones or Elvis Presley. But he never knew of that success. He never saw a penny in royalties from it, and he spent decades doing manual labor to make ends meet and raise his three daughters. It wasn’t until fans in South Africa, trying to verify rumors he was dead, tracked him down through the Internet and brought him there to perform to adoring multitudes, that his career was resuscitated.

“This was the greatest, the most amazing, true story I’d ever heard, an almost archetypal fairy tale,” said Malik Bendjelloul, the Swedish director of “Searching for Sugar Man,” a documentary that opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles. “It’s a perfect story. It has the human element, the music aspect, a resurrection and a detective story.”

Because of an odd confluence of circumstances it is also a story unlikely ever to occur again. In the era before the World Wide Web, South Africans, living under apartheid and isolated from the main currents of pop culture by domestic censorship and international sanctions, had no idea that Rodriguez languished in anonymity elsewhere. The singer himself compounded the situation by seeking to live as inconspicuously as possible.

On another, somewhat more oblique level, Mr. Bendjelloul acknowledged, “Searching for Sugar Man” can also be interpreted as a meditation on the fickle and arbitrary nature of celebrity and fame. We live in a culture, the film suggests, in which talent and quality sometimes go ignored, and when they get belated recognition, even that is often through happenstance.

“I’ve produced a lot of big-name artists with big hits, like Peter Frampton and Jerry Lee Lewis, but I’ve never worked with anyone as talented as Rodriguez,” Steve Rowland, who produced the singer’s second album, “Coming From Reality,” said in a telephone interview from his home in Palm Springs, Calif. “I never understood why he didn’t become a big star, so to see him rise like a phoenix from the ashes, it’s just as inexplicable, but it makes me really, really happy this is going on for him, because he’s a wonderful, humble person, and he really deserves it.”

“Searching for Sugar Man” takes its title from “Sugar Man,” a bleak portrait of a drug dealer and his clients that is the first track on Rodriguez’s debut album, “Cold Fact,” released in March 1970. Other songs by him that are featured in the film, like “I Wonder,” “Inner City Blues” and “A Most Disgusting Song,” address sexual and social mores, politics and economic and racial inequities — qualities that, the film explains, made them extremely attractive to young white South Africans opposed both to apartheid and the Calvinist morality that then prevailed in their country. Some even credit Rodriguez with raising their consciousness about the government’s oppression.

When Mr. Bendjelloul first heard of Rodriguez’s saga, in 2006, during a long African trip in which he was looking for ideas for his first feature-length film, he figured that someone in South Africa had already beaten him to the subject. “Every single rock you looked under, you’d find another gold coin,” he said of the information he gathered about Rodriguez’s life and music.

Photo

Rodriguez in a scene from “Searching for Sugar Man.”Credit
Sony Picture Classics

But Mr. Bendjelloul, 34, the son of an Algerian doctor and a Swedish painter, soon concluded that “the reasons the South Africans didn’t do anything about this story was that it was too familiar to them. Everybody knows it.” Since he had made programs on pop stars like Elton John, Kraftwerk and Björk while working on Swedish television, he decided to plunge ahead on a course that for a while seemed as doomed as his subject’s career.

There was, for example, the challenge of gaining the cooperation of Rodriguez, who is “very private and had to force himself to do this, I think for the sake of the work,” as Mr. Bendjelloul put it. Initially the musician’s response was, “You already have so many people, you don’t need me,” Mr. Bendjelloul recalled.

“I was skeptical about the whole idea of my being in a film,” Rodriguez (his full name is Sixto Rodriguez, though he uses only his surname) said in an interview this month, a day after “Searching for Sugar Man” was screened at the Hamptons International Film Festival. “I’m not a visual guy. I’m audio. I’m a musician. I know what I do. I play guitar, and in my category I’m doing O.K.”

Rodriguez, who turned 70 this month, learned his instrument from his father, a Mexican immigrant who went to Detroit to work in the auto plants. Musically he is steeped in the singer-songwriter protest tradition of the 1960s, having heard Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs. “And of course I’ve been into Dylan forever, and also Barry McGuire, the whole ‘Eve of Destruction’ thing.”

After his recording career collapsed, in 1972, Rodriguez, whose live performances were hampered by his habit of playing with his back to the audience, took construction jobs, demolishing and renovating houses and living modestly. In both the film and in person he seems remarkably serene about the opportunities he lost and the difficulties he had to endure.

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“You can’t linger too much on your decisions, so yes, I chose to face reality,” he said. “I’m a family person, and you make those choices. You have to embrace it, my father used to say. You don’t hold it over there, where it can hurt you. There’s no shame in hard work.”

In the bohemian Cass Corridor of Detroit, the same neighborhood that was a haven to the MC5, Iggy Pop, Creem magazine and the White Stripes, Rodriguez became a familiar figure, a lean, spectral presence dressed in black like Johnny Cash, a beloved eccentric who walked everywhere in the city and had no telephone, which complicated the South Africans’ search for him. But he also earned a degree in philosophy, specializing in logic and ethics, and dove into politics, even running for mayor of Detroit.

If “Searching for Sugar Man” has a “villain” — the word the actor Alec Baldwin, a fan of the film, used in a discussion following the Hamptons screening — it is Clarence Avant, owner of the boutique label Sussex that released Rodriguez’s two records. A former chairman of Motown Records, Mr. Avant reacts derisively on screen when asked why Mr. Rodriguez never made any money from his success in South Africa.

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The director Malik Bendjelloul.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Reached by telephone Mr. Avant, 81, said he had seen the finished film and now regrets having been so flippant with a camera rolling. “I had nothing to do with where the money went,” he said. “I don’t know who the South Africans were paying, and I don’t know who had my foreign rights.”

Asked who currently controls the Rodriguez recordings and the associated song publishing rights, Mr. Avant answered, “I do.” Mr. Bendjelloul said that even now Rodriguez “still gets nothing from his South African sales,” but Mr. Avant said that would soon be remedied as a result of a deal he has made with Universal Music, whose publishing company may be the largest in the music business.

But Rodriguez’s story also has an unsung hero, a South African record-store owner named Stephen Segerman. He first heard the artist’s protest songs when he was drafted into the South African Army, where, he says “Rodriguez’s music was for us like what Hendrix and the Doors were for the guys in Vietnam.” Years after being mustered out, still fixated on the music and shocked to learn it was unknown in the United States, he decided he had to learn what had become of his idol.

“I wanted this man to be known in his own country, though I didn’t know how that was going to happen” in the era before the Internet, Mr. Segerman said in a telephone interview from Capetown. “He’s that special, he really is, and so everyone involved with him is happy to do this, because his proper audience is Americans, not South Africans or Australians.”

“This is a story that keeps having happy endings,” Mr. Segerman, whose nickname, naturally, is “Sugar Man,” continued. “Things like this just aren’t supposed to happen in real life.”

Thanks to the buzz generated by the awards that “Searching for Sugar Man,” distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, has won on the festival circuit, and especially the extraordinarily emotional response of audiences, Rodriguez now finds his American career fully revived. He is scheduled to embark on his first national tour this summer and has been booked to appear on the “Late Show With Dave Letterman” next month. On Tuesday Sony’s Legacy label will release a soundtrack CD with newly mastered versions of 14 of the songs he recorded more than 40 years ago.

So has Rodriguez given up construction? “Well, you never throw away your work clothes,” he replied. “But this thing is like a monsoon.”

Even without the money, he added, “there have already been rewards just from the opportunity to do all this. I guess we all want to get there right away, but I believe it’s never too early, never too late.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 22, 2012, on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Real-Life Fairy Tale, Long in the Making And Set to Old Tunes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe